EMERGNCY DECLARATION wants to take you on a hyper-roller coaster ride with an airborne tale of bio-terrorism, and it does. A worthy throwback to the disaster films of a generation or so ago, it is the perfect action film for the age of COVID, and a thrill-packed time that will wring every emotion out of… Read More »
THE HANDMAIDEN (Ah-ga-ss)
Based on Sarah Water’s novel Fingersmith, Chan-Wook Park’s THE HANDMAIDEN hornswaggles its audience with its opening scenes, and then continues on for its running time to continually confound, shock, and gratify that same audience. Told in four separate chapters that each covers roughly the same action, reality becomes a series of preconceived notions that are… Read More »
TRAIN TO BUSAN (Busanhaeng)
New zombies, new rules. If TRAIN TO BUSAN did nothing but find a new take on zombies, it would be worth your time, but this Korean gem goes the extra yardage to gift us with an engrossing story that contains only a soupçon of well-regulated sappy sentiment. It’s far more interested in observing what happens… Read More »
BLING
BLING is a perfectly sweet, perfectly gentle, and perfectly harmless bit of fluffy animated comedy that will delight kids whose ages fall in the single digits. True love is the theme, and the difficulties of overcoming both self-doubt and Oscar (Jason Kravitz), an evil supervillain, provide the obstacles as mechanical whiz-kid Sam (Taylor Kitsch) spends… Read More »
MOTHER (MADEO)
After setting a monster loose on Seoul, director Bong Joon-ho has come up with something even more ferocious for his next film, MOTHER, a tale that explores the ferocity of the maternal instinct. Funny, tragic, disquieting, and absurd, it’s also nothing less than terrifying on a primal level. The film begins with the title character… Read More »
LIES (GOJITMAL)
Ah, sadomasochism, the gift that keeps on giving–welts, bruises, tattoos in all sorts of interesting places and that’s the theme of LIES, the latest flick from Jang Sun Woo, up until now one of my favorite directors on the world scene. But, hey, everyone slips up occasionally. For Jang its a particularly joyless coupling of… Read More »